Tiling Dublin 4

Noel O’Gara featured again on RTE’s Today with Pat Kenny as he’s just set up a tile market in Dartmouth Square. He got a rough time from some of the programme’s listeners, particularly some naïve but rude comments about his being a red-neck with no empathy for Dublin.

The reality is that he’s just a property speculator who somehow managed to get his hands on a valuable piece of real estate at a knock-down price and he’s determined to maximise his financial gain.

To that end, he’ll do whatever he can to annoy the local population in order to ensure that local politicians pressurise the council to get this sorted out as quickly as possible. He is also, through his car-parking and tile market ventures and by talking up the possibility of apartment blocks, seeking to demonstrate the commercial value of the property when it comes to be assessed under a CPO process.

Frankly, I find it a bit rich for the politicians to be criticising O‘Gara. After all, our Dáil occupants have converted Leinster Lawn into a surface carpark for their own private use for the past several years, an act of public vandalism which is in blatant contravention of the same local planning guidelines which were used in Court to stop O'Gara operating Dartmouth Square as a car-park.

What I’d like to know is how he came to hear about the Dartmouth Square property and how he managed to buy it at such a knockdown price. Any more cheap public parks coming up in the near future?